Since I owe you...

... a real blog entry, I just thought I'd tell you about one of my cultural weaknesses.

Now, I know some of you think of me as a dive bar-going, whiskey-shooting, authority-disregarding hard ass. [smirk] But deep down, buried somewhere within the core of my being, existing in a place that seldom sees the light of day, lies some small shred of my Korean-ness.

To put this into perspective: throughout my youth, my more-Korean cousins accused me of practicing RSH (Racial Self-Hatred). You might have heard some of the more common, more specific versions of this, like banana (yellow on the outside, white on the inside) or Oreo (you get the picture).

It was not RSH, however. I love being Korean. But I was the product of a Korean family living amongst the bleach-white denizens of middle America. When most (all) of your friends are white, everyone you see is white, and everyone in the media (save Connie Chung) is white, you tend to start acting like a white person. Call it cultural bleed.

Of course, I was part of a Korean church, and we had a youth group, but we were all in the same boat. When the kids would hang out, what language do you think we used? What music do you think we listened to? (In the '80s and '90s, being Koreans born in the early '70s, the answer to that is Depeche Mode, New Order, The Smiths, Erasure, and U2.) We only really spoke Korean to each other when we were out in public and wanted to talk smack about the white people around us.

No, people speaking foreign languages around you are not necessarily saying bad things about you. If they start in English, then switch to a foreign language while they laugh and point at you? That's probably a different story.

Getting back on point, I always thought of my experiences as fairly normal. And they were. For a Korean kid growing up in an upper-middle-class, suburban, Midwestern town. Then I would visit my cousins, particularly my cousins in Toronto. These kids grew up... well, first off, they grew up in Canada, which is strange enough. On top of that, they grew up in Toronto, which has more Asians per capita than some of Asia. So of course they were going to think that I was white-washed.

Anyway, the whole point of this tale: Brandy and I went to the SF Symphony last night. And aside from the six-year old girl sitting with her parents, we were the youngest people in the building by at least a decade. Yes, symphony attendance (when under the age of forty) is usually indicative of Asian-ness.

In any case, it was a nice program. Antonín Dvorák's Carnival Overture, Opus 92; William Schuman's A Song of Orpheus featuring Michael Grebanier on cello; and Dvorák's Symphony No. 7 in D minor, Opus 70.

I do enjoy me some classical music.

Tomorrow, I'll go over my (highly subjective) criteria for being a stereotypical Korean. And how I relate to those criteria.